Facing Difficult People - Zodiac Course 2025

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Social and Antisocial Forces

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Steiner repeatedly emphasizes that we are naturally evolving/being developed (by the Gods) in our individuality, that this aspect of us will continue to grow stronger and stronger and thus antisocial forces are naturally on the rise. “In the 5th post-Atlantean epoch, we will manifest antisocial forces to the greatest degree and bring about distressing conditions” (GA 186).

Thus if we are not to come to a war of all against all we must work to counter this by developing social forces especially in our soul life that will then help us to build healthy cultures.

In Social and Antisocial Instincts, GA 186, Chpt 4 (Challenge of our Times, 1918 Nov 29 Dec 18) he states:

  • social problems must be understood from an intimate knowledge of the human being
  • We must become aware of ourselves in relation to what is social
  • we have become lazy in our thinking and often seek the simplest answers
  • our self love leads to illusions about ourselves
  • our antisocial impulses make us ill, therefore our social nature brings healing
  • the illness manifests as moodiness, self-torturing, torture of others, struggling to get through something disagreeable
  • comfort puts us to sleep, while struggle wakes us up

In our thinking:

  • we love our ideas to the exclusion of other and this makes us prejudiced
  • only in sleep are we truly social beings, there we are true and straightforward
  • sleep is a social leveller- we are placed amongst those we detest in our sleep
  • we ‘sleep’ into one another when we seek to really understand each other but then there is a natural tendency to ‘defend’ ourselves from them, we must teach ourselves to not defend

Everything not in a process of becoming evidences a deficiency, weakness or incompleteness.

In our feeling:

  • our feeling about others give us an untrue sentiment of the other when we are ruled by our sympathies and antipathies in our feeling life
  • those who are critical really show no interest in the other
  • we fix people according to how we judge them based on our sympathy and antipathy

We must adopt a waiting life with regard to our feelings about others and resist our automatic and subconscious images of them

In our willing:

  • here we are sympathy and antipathy in action
  • much of our love for others is really self-love; our soul in is rapture around them
  • example of how a father loves his son more than others
  • Life makes us antisocial to a high degree and we must be brutally honest with ourselves about it

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA186/English/AP1941/19181206p01.html